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The glitter, aristocratic eccentricity and wry comedy of Anita Leslie's childhood autobiography, The Gilt and The Gingerbread, was well caught by the Irish Times reviewer who wrote that 'If Somerville and Ross, J. P. Donleavy and Caroline Blackwood all sat down together to write the Great Irish Novel, they might evoke something very like the world of Anita Leslie.' The sequel, A Story Half Told, deals with Anita' s war years --- but this apparently more sombre subject is spiced with all the gaiety of her first autobiography, punctuated, after five years abroad, by tragic brushes with danger and destruction as she drove her French army ambulance into the heart of Germany. From the outbreak of war Anita Leslie wondered how to join the fray. Just before the Battle of Britain she enlisted in the Mechanised Transport Corps and after training sailed for Cape Town with sixty girl drivers. Eventually they reached Egypt and drove wounded during the battles of the Western Desert. When Sir Walter Monckton appointed her to edit a troops newspaper she embarked on hectic chases from Turkey to the Euphrates and found it necessary to transcribe copy from the Morse, with Arab compositors who knew not one word of English. As Winston Churchill's cousin, Anita might suddenly find herself invited to stay with army commanders such as General Alexander, whose home lay near hers in Ireland, but most of her time was spent with other ranks. Eventually, after a summer working with ambulance planes in Italy, she joined the French Army as an ambulance driver because it alone allowed women to drive in the front line. In the 1st French Armoured Division (by 1944 seven French divisions were fighting on their own soil) she saw the winter battle which resulted in the capture of Alsace and in early April 1945 this division crossed the Rhine. Twelve ambulances, each with two girl drivers, accompanied the tanks, armoured cars and infantry. After a chase through the Black Forest and the capture of Sigmaringen Castle, whence Petain had fled a few hours before, Anita and her co-driver found themselves only a few miles from Berchtesgarten. In the meantime, Anita had met her future husband, a British submarine commander. But that is another story. Anita Leslie lives with her husband, the well-known sailor Bill King, in a Norman tower which rises dramatically out of Galway Bay. Apart from her first autobiography (reviewed below) she has written several widely acclaimed biographies, and the best-seller Edwardians in Love.

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